Thursday, June 27, 2013

Eyad Kishawi of Al Awda spreads misinformation. Again

Eyad Kishawi, one of the movers and shakers of the northern California extremist group, Al-Awda might be a little too quick on the send button. Although he's been challenged more than once for sending false and misleading information, it still seems to happen. regularly.

Presenting this weeks indiscretion from Eyad Kishawi: Spreading a quote falsely attributed to Nelson Mandela, and widely exposed as a fraud as early as 2007.

Joel Pollack of Guide to the Perplexed has a couple of posts on the Sabeel conference at the Old South Church. In the first one he discusses a quotation from Nelson Mandela on the back of the Official Program.

I sat down in a pew near the front and opened the folder
of conference materials. The back page of the official program was
entitled “Apartheid?” and was filled with quotes and maps aimed at
proving the Israel-apartheid analogy. They had a line from Jimmy Carter,
a line from Archbishop Desmond Tutu (the conference’s keynote speaker),
and a line from—no, wait, really?—Nelson Mandela:

“Apartheid is a crime against humanity. Israel has deprived millions
of Palestinians of their liberty and property. It has perpetuated a
system of gross racial discrimination and inequality. It has
systematically incarcerated and tortured thousands of Palestinians,
contrary to the rules of international law. It has, in particular, waged
a war against a civilian population, in particular children.”

Sounds rather damning, doesn’t it? And who could disagree with Nelson
Mandela? There’s only one problem: Nelson Mandela never said, wrote or
endorsed those words. They are the creation of an Arab journalist named
Arjan El Fassed. When I exposed El Fassed’s fraud earlier this year, he claimed: “There is no possible basis for Pollak to say I intended people to believe the memo was written by anyone other than myself.”In spite of El Fassed’s admission, the Israel-haters continue to use his Mandela quote to promote their views.

Years after this quote was exposed and relegated to the midden heap of agitprop, its still polished off and paraded as fact. According to the media watchdog CAMERA this fake quote, written by Arjan El Fassed, an activist affiliated with Al Awda (You knew that Eyad. I know you did) made it though eight PC(USA) voting bodies (five presbyteries and three
committees) before it appeared on the agenda of the denomination's
General Assembly in 2012. And now, 6 years after it was first exposed as a fraud, Eyad Kishawi is still spreading it.

Prof. Landes writes "The ability to distinguish empirical information that reflects what
happened, and information that comes from dishonest sources, constitutes
one of the fundamental skills of any civil society."